DATA PROMPTS DEBATE ON RACIAL VIOLENCE

WASHINGTON -- Underlying a debate that has been raging between Assistant Attorney General William Bradford Reynolds and civil rights advocates over whether racial violence in the country has increased lies a fact that neither side disputes: there are no reliable data on racial, religious and ethnic violence.

Reynolds, who heads the Justice Department's civil rights division, has repeatedly asserted that there has been no increase in overall racial violence despite highly publicized racial attacks in the Howard Beach section of Queens in New York City and Forsyth County, Georgia.

Civil rights groups say there is no evidence to back up Reynold's assertion. Indeed, they report that all available evidence collected on such matters indicates the opposite.

Justice Department officials said Reynolds had based his assertion on informal surveys of federal prosecutors and on the number of civil rights complaints filed with the department.

Civil rights leaders countered that they, too, had relied on information supplied by the Justice Department through its Community Relations Service. The service found that the number of racial incidents reported to the government rose to 276 last year from 99 in 1980.

But officials at the agency cautioned that their figures were only an aggregate count of the number of situations to which they respond in a given year.

Currently, no government agency or private organization collects national data on incidents of racial, religious and ethnic violence. Moreover, only a handful of law-enforcement agencies keep records of incidents of violence motivated by hatred, although several major cities, including New York, have created special units to handle crimes motivated by hatred.

In the absence of systematic nationwide data, there is no way to determine the level of hate-violence activity against members of minority groups, or whether the number of incidents has increased, decreased or stayed the same in recent years, according to statisticians.

"Without better data, no one can say with certainty whether violent racism is actually on the upswing or whether it is merely receiving more attention from social workers and the media alike," said Morris Dees, executive director of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala.

"Several major cities have recently reported increases," he added, "and our organization's files reflect an increase in major incidents in both 1985 and 1986 over 1984."

The resulting confusion has fueled a debate both inside and outside government, with civil rights groups accusing Reagan administration officials of dismissing a series of recent racist incidents as isolated events, rather than developing an effective strategy to prevent such crimes.

This year, for the third year in a row, a bill has been introduced in Congress that would require the attorney general to collect and publish annual statistics on crimes motivated by racial, religious or ethnic hatred.

Col. Leonard Supenski of the Baltimore County Police Department, which has developed procedures for handling incidents and crimes motivated by hatred, was critical of the proposed legislation.

"One of the main problems with the bill is that it fails to include the collection of data on bigotry-related incidents that were not connected to a crime," Supenski said. "A large part of our incidents have nothing to do with a crime. Unless that point is cleared up, what you'll end up with is a lot of under-reporting or over-reporting of incidents."

Localities and private organizations that gather information on crimes motivated by hatred indicated that their numbers did not accurately reflect the nature of the problem, because the systems are imperfect and because of the difficulty in establishing bias as a motivating factor in an offense.